Simulated hair and fur is quickly becoming an amazing feature to add increased visual fidelity to games these days. It’s been a standard feature in offline visual effects for years and has continued to become more impressive. Films such as Mighty Joe Young, King Kong, Avatar, and Rise of the Planet of the Apes have all used hair and fur technologies on entirely computer-generated characters to sell a more complete immersion into the story being told. A less obvious use of this...

NVIDIA HairWorks makes it easy to bring hair and fur to life—in real-time! It builds on the prior release, which focused on fur authoring, rendering, and simulation. With HairWorks version 1.1, NVIDIA has added support for authoring, rendering, and simulation of long-hair assets. HairWorks can be used for high-quality assets similar to the example below from Tarkan Sarim, with 500k hair. It can easily scale down to lower quality assets for use in a variety of games. Since HairWorks is...

I recently delivered a presentation on Hybrid Ray Traced Shadows (HRTS) at GDC 2015, as part of the “Advanced Visual Effects with DirectX 11 & 12” tutorial. If you weren’t fortunate enough to attend GDC, then you can catch up with what I was talking about right here!
As the name suggests, the technique combines ray tracing with conventional shadow mapping, to deliver extremely high quality contact-hardening style shadows. You end up with the best of both worlds, with...

NVIDIA is using CUDA and the power of GeForce to accelerate Adaptive Scalable Texture Compression (ASTC) along multiple axes!
Guest Blogger: Fei Yang
As a programmer, I love challenging jobs, and this is one them!
Adaptive Scalable Texture Compression (ASTC) is a new standard for texture compression that provides development teams and art directors with the ability to balance texture quality and texture size. Texture compression is not new, but ASTC provides a far greater number of options...

Introducing NVIDIA AndroidWorks, the best native application development tools for Android, now available for all Android platforms.
NVIDIA AndroidWorks installs all software tools required to develop for Android and reduces the complex process of configuring an Android development system down to a single click. Based on our Tegra Android Developer Pack (TADP), AndroidWorks is a professional grade solution designed to configure a development environment that will work with most Android...